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Plain Fruit Cake
½ pound currants (well washed) ½ pound raisins 1 cup butter (beaten to a cream) 1 cup white sugar 1 cup milk 3 cups Five Roses flour 3 eggs (beaten separately) 3 teaspoons baking powder Paper a dish and bake 1 hour
A creamed-butter cake carrying a pound of dried fruit, written for a cook who already knew what temperature her oven ran at. The gaps are heat and pan size.
- "Paper a dish"Line the pan — bottom and sides — with buttered parchment. With this much sugar and fruit the outside will scorch long before the centre sets, and the paper is the only insulation the original offers.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 325F; a heavy fruited batter an hour deep needs slow, steady heat rather than the 350F you would give a plain layer cake.
- Pan size and timingNo pan is specified. This is a large batter for its flour weight; an 8-inch square or a 9-inch round of loaf depth is a reasonable choice, and it may be near the brim. One hour suits that depth, but test with a skewer at 55 minutes — in a deeper tin it may want 75 to 80.
- "Eggs beaten separately"Yolks into the creamed butter and sugar, whites whipped to soft peaks and folded in last. Fold rather than stir so the whites keep what air they hold.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat household flour, closer to modern all-purpose than to cake flour. Plain all-purpose, spooned and levelled, gives the right result — about 13 oz for the three cups.
- Currants and raisinsZante currants are still sold; they are dried grapes, not the fresh berry. Wash both fruits as instructed, then dry them well and toss with a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to three cups of flour is the ordinary one-per-cup ratio. Use single-acting or double-acting as you have it and get the cake into the oven promptly.
- YieldAbout 3 lb of cake. It keeps a week wrapped.
"Plain" here is often read less as a modest word than as a technical one: it seems to mark the cake as free of brandy, molasses, spice and candied peel, the things that made a proper Christmas or wedding fruit cake an expensive, months-ahead undertaking. This is the everyday version — butter, sugar, milk, eggs, baking powder and a pound of cheap dried fruit — leavened chemically rather than aged, and eaten within the week. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by Lake of the Woods Milling Company from 1913 onward and offered cheaply to purchasers of its flour, built largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, which explains both the brevity and the assumption that the reader knows her own stove better than any printed number could tell her.